The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

38. 1988 - Die Hard

Die Hard Bruce Willis
Fox

Honourable Mentions: Beetlejuice, Midnight Run, Who Framed Roger Rabbit

It's an unfortunate reality that the vast majority of the action films of the 1980s are characterised as excessive cheesefests, antiquated by the egos of their leads and the wanton destruction of their gunfights, because - as many genre proponents will confirm - there is both craft and nuance in them there hills.

If any filmmaker were to exemplify that sense of underestimation, it'd have to be John McTiernan, who proved himself a master of genre subversion during an eight-year period from the late eighties through to the mid-nineties. His 1987 classic, Predator - which is also in contention to be the greatest action film of all time - took contemporary genre icons like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers and placed them within the confines of a sci-fi slasher, while 1990's The Hunt for Red October - based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name - spotlighted the bookish but determined CIA analyst Jack Ryan as he butts heads with all manner of stringent military archetypes. (He also co-developed 1993's ill-fated but supremely underrated genre tribute/parody Last Action Hero.)

But the action film most commonly regarded to have recalibrated the genre's trajectory is Die Hard, McTiernan's 1988 blockbuster famed for its wisecracking protagonist who gets his ass kicked as much as he delivers the ass-kicking.

Die Hard was famously laughed out of cinemas when its trailer first played, with audiences perplexed that the star of Moonlighting was now duking it out with machine-gun-wielding criminals in a high-rise office building, but that's merely a testament to the transgressive abilities of McTiernan as a filmmaker. He ushered in a whole new era of action cinema, took Bruce Willis from TV to the big screen, and delivered a then-unmatched level of genre spectacle - and it's arguably not even his best film.

(Just don't get bogged down in the Christmas movie debate, for all our sakes.)

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.